Safe Disk

[Sofía Goldthwait]

QILINGSafe Disk keeps your confidential data in a strongly encrypted form on your disk and provides you with transparent access to it from any application. Safe Disk is a program that allows the creation and use of virtual encrypted drives. You create a container file on an existing hard drive which is created with a specific password. The virtual drive can then only be accessed with the correct password. Without the correct password the files on the virtual drive are totally inaccessible. Once the password has been entered correctly and the drive is mounted the new virtual drive can then be used as a normal drive, files can be saved and retrieved to the drive. Maximum size of an encrypted drive mapped to a correspondent container file is 2048 GBytes. Upgrades: Upgrades are free. System requirements: All Windows. Algorithm: Safe Disk uses Blowfish (448 bit keysize), AES (256 bit keysize), GOST (256 bit keysize) and 3DES (168 bit keysize).

Protect your data in flash media and USB hard disk drives

Ultimate security standard for encryption at the physical sector level. Based on the most secure technology, AES256, this product is an outstanding data security tool. Support of flash media and USB hard disk drives, so that no one will be able to access your data if you lose it.

Protect your confidential data

Security of your company's financial data and personal computer privacy; Lack of access to the logs of your computer activity (site visit logs in the browser history, history logs of the instant messenger, incoming and outgoing emails).

Free fast AES 128-bit Disk encryption program. Private Disk Light allows you to create a Secure space for all your work, exchange encrypted data with others, and feel sure that your information is safe from external and internal manipulation.

The perfect solution for protecting your sensitive information from theft or other attacks. The program makes a part of your current hard Disk into a Secure Disk. All private and confidential information stored on this Disk will be protected by strong encryption.

QILING Safe Disk keeps your confidential data in a strongly encrypted form on your disk and provides you with transparent access to it from any application. Safe Disk is a program that allows the creation and use of virtual encrypted drives. You create a container file on an existing hard drive which is created with a specific password. The virtual drive can then only be accessed with the correct password. Without the correct password the files on the virtual drive are totally inaccessible. Once the password has been entered correctly and the drive is mounted the new virtual drive can then be used as a normal drive, files can be saved and retrieved to the drive. Maximum size of an encrypted drive mapped to a correspondent container file is 2048 GBytes. Upgrades: Upgrades are free.

Looking for advice on how to upgrade the disk firmware on a P2000. What I thought would be a safe way to do this was to first get all the data off of the vdisk by migrating them to a different vdisk on the MSA. Once it's all clear, go through the vdisk's drives and upgrade their firmware via the MSA's Update Firmware section using the .fla file download. However I've noticed that even though I'm not touching any of the other vdisks on the MSA, I'm always seeing disconnects of the other vdisks during the upgrade. Even if I'm doing the upgrade using controller A and the other vdisks are using controller B, still getting disconnects.

NOTE: Disk drive upgrades on the HP MSA 1040/2040 and P2000 G3 is an offline process. All host and array I/O must be stopped prior to the upgrade. For more information, see the HP Modular Storage Array Reference Guides. All firmware flash progress messages are logged to /var/cpq/MSA2000_IP.log and flash summary is logged to /var/cpq/Component.log.

Yeah, I did read that as well. Seems super odd that if there are critical HDD firmware to apply, one has to stop all production in order to do so. I have applied FW updates before on a live system. Get lots of "Ophaned Data" alerts from the MSA and vSphere hicups a bit. But it is short lived. Rather not have to do it like that again unless I must.

However, I already did this update online too, but on a single disk at a time only. When selecting more disks, then the update sequence will be too fast and create a mess resulting in unavailable data.

Ahh, that makes sense. When I did just 1 drive of the vDisk, I didn't really see much in vSphere happen. Just the Orphaned Data e-mail from the controller. Wasn't until I did the rest of that array did I noticed some issues in vSphere. Fortunately vSphere seems to be pretty resiliant to drops like that.

I do not expect a change at least for the P2000 (this is G3), but hopefully seagate (dothill formerly) as the OEM will do the homework and improve this process for newer generations like MSA2040 ... :-)

By the way, the 3PAR set the disk in question in logging mode, that means more or less offline, reads and writes are going to the other disks in the disk set, update the firmware, put the disk online again and sync the data from the logging drives; even a replaced disk will be adjusted automatically - sounds perfect.

You can add the option -nN to only do this N times, to save time on large capacity devices. This might take a while, depending on the size of your external hard drive (I think it takes twenty minutes or so for my 4 GB flash drive).

Then add a single partition that uses all of the unallocated space on the device, choosing fat32 as the file system. Apply the changes by click the Apply button (the green checkmark) in the toolbar.

This will overwrite the whole disk with zeros and is considerably faster than generating gigabytes of random data. Like all the other tools this won't take care of blocks that were mapped out for whatever reason (write errors, reserved, etc.), but it's highly unlikely your buyer will have the tools and the knowledge to recover anything from those blocks.

PS: Before you Bruce Schneier fanboys downvote me: I want proof that it's possible to recover data from a non-ancient rotational hard drive that has been overwritten with zeros. Don't even think about commenting otherwise! :P

Were the "?" is, put the number of times you wan to shred the drive, then for were "(drive)" is, put the drive that you want to shred. Once your done, do whatever you want with it. I think that this method is more effective since you can control what is done to your drive and have immediate results.

Darik's Boot and Nuke (commonly known as DBAN) [...] is designed to securely erase a hard disk until data is permanently removed and no longer recoverable, which is achieved by overwriting the data with random numbers generated by Mersenne twister or ISAAC (a PRNG). The Gutmann method, Quick Erase, DoD Short (3 passes), and DOD 5220.22-M (7 passes) are also included as options to handle Data remanence.

DBAN can be booted from a floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB flash drive and it is based on Linux. It supports PATA (IDE), SCSI and SATA hard drives. DBAN can be configured to automatically wipe every hard disk that it sees on a system, making it very useful for unattended data destruction scenarios. DBAN exists for Intel x86 and PowerPC systems.

DBAN, like other methods of data erasure, is suitable for use prior to computer recycling for personal or commercial situations, such as donating or selling a computer[2]. In the case of malware infection, DBAN can be used before returning a disk to production.

CAUTION: Do not proceed with this if the target drive is not connected directly to a SATA/NVMe interface. Issuing the Secure Erase/Format/Sanitize command on a drive connected via USB or a SAS/RAID card could potentially brick the drive!

Use nwipe, it's command line or ncurses GUI. Has multiple wipe methods. Can wipe many devices simultaneously. It's the more up to date version of DBAN and is currently maintained. Nwipe can be found in most Linux distros and is available as a bootable USB version called Shredos

Those recommending to use shred are giving bad advice. Shred's own man page says it's effectively useless on journaled filesystems, which Ubuntu is almost guaranteed to be using if you don't change its filesystem defaults (ext3 and ext4 are journaled. As is resierfs and Reiser4 as well as many MANY other common Linux filesystems.).

Not to mention shred is completely useless for completely blanking or randomizing a disk, as it only works on individual files or sets of files (On the filesystem level, not a raw data level.). If you want to securely wipe a disk, you gotta use dd on the drive's main device node (For example: /dev/sdc instead of /dev/sdc1) while nothing is mounted on it.

It WILL take a while, but unlike shred it will completely and IRREVERSIBLY wipe a hard disk from MBR to final sector. Also, BIG WARNING on dd, make sure you are using it on the correct device or you'll at least PARTIALLY wipe the wrong disk. This could be disastrous if you accidentally use dd on a system drive, which will not only make it unbootable, but may irreversibly corrupt any given partition on the drive. This has given it the nickname "disk destroyer."

Shred is NOT a reliable tool for securely wiping a drive. If you're selling or giving your computer away the CORRECT way to empty the drive is to zero or randomize it with dd and never, ever use shred, as filesystem journals will effectively restore shredded files with no effort at all.

In the good old days, backups went to tapes, some of which were often offline if not offsite. This made it difficult to destroy all backups (accidentally or maliciously), especially if the network/servers have been compromised.

you can obviously experiment with pull method of taking backups - so it's your backup server that connects to machines and copies the files. make sure backup machine is not internet reachable, is located in remote office / datacenter - this can actually work.

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